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<h2>Social bookmarking</h2>
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<h4>What is it?</h4>

<p>The holy grail of search engines is <b>relevance</b>. One recent development 
towards finding relevant material is <b>social bookmarking</b>. Exampels of 
social bookmarkign systems include del.icio.us, CiteULike and Connotea.</p>

<p>Social bookmarking systems use the behaviour of many people (the 'swarm') to 
identify resources of interest. It is based on the idea that if many people 
bookmark a resource, it is important. This is similar to the way that Google, 
Teoma and other search engines rate sites according to the number and rating of 
other sites which point to them. It also allows you to follow the tags applied 
to a resource to find other resources which share the same tag, or to follow 
other tags used by the people who tagged the resource. </p>

<p>The problem with most social bookmarking software is that it makes no 
distinction between 'important' people and the rest. In fact, simple weighting 
means that the most significant people are those who create the most bookmarks. 
Most social bookmarking systems are also anonymous, so you can't identify and 
follow the tags of people you know and respect.</p>

<p>The swarm is also far too democratic - it is unlikely to have a focused 
interest on early 15th century French literature! The most popular tags on 
del.icio.us are mostly IT-related - blog, design, web, programming, software, 
web2.0, ajax, css, music, tools, reference, linux, webdesign, news, javascript, 
video, art, java, blogs, and shopping and on CiteULike (which is more oriented 
towards academics) cancer, collaboration, design, evolution, information, 
network, review, social, structure, theory.</p>

<h4>HEURIST's take on social bookmarking</h4>

<p>HEURIST attempts to overcome the democracy of the swarm by not accepting 
anonymous users, and by allowing the identification of groups of colleagues who 
share specific interests - we call these User Clouds, although our programmers 
think they should be called Friends (but who is to say we actually like the 
people who occupy the same academic space?). </p>

<p>&lt;under development, 3/06&gt; HEURIST then orders search results according to the 
average of the ratings provided by you or by identifiable groups of colleagues. 
This means that referernces rated highly by a group of people with identifiable 
shared interests will appear near the top of search results. Not everyone is 
limited to a single research area, so each user can define several User Clouds 
covering different areas of interest, allowing focussed discovery of new 
resources. This is a much more powerful methodology for discovering resources of 
specific interest than a generic 'popularity' index. We are still working on the 
weighting algorithms as at March 2006.</p>

<p>The HEURIST approach to social bookmarking will also allow the identification 
of colleagues with shared interests through identification of users who have a 
similar pattern of bookmarking. We expect to work on this in third quarter 2006 
once all major functionality is complete and the user base starts to grow - it's 
not very useful until then.</p>

<h4>Creating user clouds</h4>

<p>to write</p>

<h4>Following keywords</h4>

<p>to write</p>

<p>&nbsp;</p>

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<h3>See also</h3>

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